Translingual Empowerment: Exophonic Women’s Writing in Catalan and Spanish

Abstract

On claiming that a language constitutes ‘the only country without borders’, German-Bosnian writer Saša Stanišić taps into the multifaceted debates surrounding its role in literary practice. Throughout history, the global movement and mixing of peoples, languages, cultures and ideas has triggered diverse, innovative and experimental creativity. Translingual writing, in which the writer adopts a second language, or moves between two or more named languages in their work, is an example of such. National literatures, conceived of as repositories of the nation since the consolidation of nation-states in the nineteenth century, are conditioned and policed according to essentialist markers of linguistic, geo- and bio- politics. Inclusion in literary traditions, termed literary ‘citizenship’ in a reflection of its relation to national identity, has historically been barred from writers and texts that do not adhere to stringent categorisation. Located across and between languages and cultures, translingual texts resist this facile classification. Pointing to the plurilingualism inherent in national cultures, they emit fluid, multifaceted, and conflicting transnational cultures and identities that destabilise the bounded, monolingual parameters of the ‘imagined communities’ identified by Benedict Anderson.